Topic: Impact of large scale network disruption? (Read 963 times)

But it does affect the bitcoin development in the country disconnecting from the other counties' network.  A fork will be created in the country and all the trasactions occurring there like off-chain transaction. All the miners will be leaving the mining business. And holders are reluct to take any bitcoin payment rather to hold what they are having in case to lose all the bitcoins from the main chain. It means bitcoin is dead in that country.

It's hard to imagine the Internet getting segmented airtight.  It would have to be a country deliberately and totally cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

Any node with access to both sides would automatically flow the block chain over, such as someone getting around the blockade with a dial-up modem or sat-phone.  It would only take one node to do it.  Anyone who wants to keep doing business would be motivated.

If the network is segmented and then recombines, any transactions in the shorter fork that were not also in the longer fork are released into the transaction pool again and are eligible to get into future blocks.  Their number of confirmations would start over.

If anyone took advantage of the segmentation to double-spend, such that there are different spends of the same money on each side, then the double-spends in the shorter fork lose out and go to 0/unconfirmed and stay that way.

It wouldn't be easy to take advantage of the segmentation to double-spend.  If it's impossible to communicate from one side to the other, how are you going to put a spend on each side?  If there is a way, then probably someone else is also using it to flow the block chain over.

You would usually know whether you're in the smaller segment.  For example, if your country cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the rest of the world is the larger segment.  If you're in the smaller segment, you should assume nothing is confirmed.

I don't think it would affect bitcoin. There are both nodes and miners (and copies of the blockchain) throughout the world. If one country were to "disconnect" from the internet then the rest of the network would be able to continue to operate as normal. Both nodes and miners get disconnected for a number of reasons (they are also brought online as well).

I also don't think that the number of nodes running in Russia is even very large, they are not friendly to bitcoin as it is now so I doubt that many people are wanting to run a node from there.

President Vladimir Putin will convene a meeting of his security council on Monday. It will discuss what steps Moscow might take to disconnect Russian citizens from the web "in an emergency", the Vedomosti newspaper reported. The goal would be to strengthen Russia's sovereignty in cyberspace. The proposals could also bring the domain .ru under state control, it suggested.